Valerie O'Riordan

R.W. Connell argues that masculinity is not a unitary phenomenon; rather, that masculinities emerge out of situationally specific choices drawn from a ‘cultural repertoire’ of so-called masculine behaviour that result in a particular ‘configuration of practice.’ Ben Lerner’s novel The Topeka School (2019) calls attention to this process by focussing on the coding of particular speech-acts as masculine in the context of mid-nineties, small-town Kansas; moreover, he contextualises these particular speech-acts as the cultural precursors to the political rise of the alt-right, leading to Trump’s presidency. In The Topeka School, then, speech-acts are not simply gendered but shown to have significant political ramifications. In this paper I argue that while Lerner dissects the genealogy of this particular construction of masculinity, he also presents alternative models of gendered speech-acts that subvert what Hélène Cixous calls the libidinal and cultural masculine economy, and that he explicitly links each of these models to the figure of the mother. Lerner thus suggests a gender-inclusive speaking-back against the dominant masculinist order, with the mother acting as a key locus of political dissent, resistance, and change – he suggests, too, what Connell would call a necessary reconfiguration of masculine practice.

This article argues that David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide (2008) offers us a culturally significant exploration of hegemonic theories around how we understand, or are said to understand, the temporality of trauma, its effect upon identity via its effect upon memory, and its representation in narrative. Moreover, the specific structure of Vann’s text as a short story cycle enables it to present, query and disrupt ways of thinking about chronology, narrative, and identity, such that it offers a productive modeling of the complications inherent in adhering to exclusionary and prescriptive ideas about how trauma might be narrated.

In her stories “Pure Language” (2010) and “Black Box” (2012), Jennifer Egan evinces concern with the complex relationship(s) between technology, morality and narrative in a post-9/11 Western world. In “Pure Language” we see the digital handset symptomatizing, facilitating and challenging a generation’s collective eschewal of individual moral responsibility; in ‘Black Box’, the figure of the cyborg embodies, performs and critiques the role of the ‘hero’ in the context of a U.S. nationalism characterized by the escalation of mass political factionalism. In this paper, I argue that Egan utilizes both these motifs and the character of Lulu (featured in both stories), as a way of working through how we might exist as moral agents in a world that is increasingly both politically polarized and technologically hybridized.

In Walt Whitman’s Civil War poetry, grief and mourning emerge alongside democracy as the poet’s key themes. This paper argues, however, that it is not simply his elucidation of (personal and/or national) grief, or indeed mourning, that comprises Whitman’s key contribution(s) to poetic (and American) discourse, but rather his use of what Leslie Jamison refers to as ‘embodied empathy’ (Jamison, 2007, p.23) as an affective response to that grief, whereby Whitman’s celebrated (and frequently problematized) anti-hierarchical vision of American democracy is manifested through his empathic dissolution of the bodily boundaries between the subjects and (wounded and dying) objects of his work. While Whitman’s racial politics have been (rightly) criticized, his work has, nonetheless, a continuing and significant resonance to twenty-first century readers in the wake of the crisis in American democracy occasioned by the terrorist attacks of September 11th2001 and the U.S. government’s subsequent ideological and legislative response(s). This paper looks at a recent fictional reimagining of both Whitman and his democratic vision – Chris Adrian’s Gob’s Grief(2002) – and argues that Whitman’s work on the Civil War provides Adrian, and his contemporary readers, with an empathic framework for the articulation of a productive response both to individual loss and mass carnage, a framework that has become particularly necessary post-9/11.